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Vipassana Retreats in the Style of Mahasi Sayadaw Are Not Conducted in Complete Isolation Given That Meditators Eat and Meditate Together

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Vipassana Retreats in the Style of Mahasi Sayadaw Are Not Conducted in Complete Isolation Given That Meditators Eat and Meditate Together CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by The University of Sydney: Sydney eScholarship Journals online The Vipassana Retreat Experience: A Consideration of the Meditation Retreat as a Religious Paradigm of Travel Glenys Eddy Introduction Despite the scarcity of references to meditation retreats in the large volume of research and literature concerning the relationship between modern leisure tourism and forms of religiously motivated travel, 1 the number of meditation retreat centres has increased worldwide in recent decades. Michael Stausberg notes the growth in the international spiritual retreat business since the 1980s, 2 and lists the visitation of retreats as one of the common purposes of religious tourism,3 itself one of the various forms of contemporary spiritual life that are a result of the increased leisure time available to us in our modern life. 4 Meditation retreats, by their style of presentation and advertisement, may resemble other forms of religious travel. Websites of some Buddhist retreat centres have the facility where the enquirer can download the retreat schedule, whilst others have web pages that advertise forthcoming retreats, almost in the manner of a catalogue from which to browse the types of retreat on offer. 5 Some even have testimonials to the efficacy of particular retreats, seen, for instance, in the Finding Freedom in the Body: Mindfulness of the Body as a Gateway to Liberation retreat, held recently between 10 and 15 April 2012, 6 and advertised on the website of the Spirit Rock Meditation Centre. Dr Glenys Eddy completed her doctoral thesis in the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney in 2007. She is an independent scholar and author of Becoming Buddhist: Experiences of Socialization and Self-Transformation in Two Australian Buddhist Centres (Continuum International Publishing, 2012). 1 See, for instance, Boris Vukonic, Tourism and Religion (Oxford: Pergamon, 1996); Alex Norman, Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society (London and New York: Continuum, 2011); and Michael Stausberg, Religion and Tourism: Crossroads, Destinations and Encounters (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). 2 Stausberg, Religion and Tourism, p. 133. 3 Stausberg, Religion and Tourism, p. 14. 4 Vukonic, Tourism and Religion, p. 4. 5 See, for instance, Insight Meditation Australia (2012), at http://www.insightmeditationaustralia.org/index.html. Accessed 13/03/2012. 6 See Spirit Rock Meditation Centre (2012), at http://www.spiritrock.org/. Accessed 13/03/2012. Literature & Aesthetics 22 (1) June 2012, page 38 Glenys Eddy Fundamental to the argument of this article, however, is that despite the superficial resemblance of meditation retreats to other forms of religious travel, intensive meditation retreats warrant investigation as specifically liminal phenomena, in distinction to other religiously motivated travel phenomena, such as pilgrimage, designated by Turner as liminoid.7 According to the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, the term ‘retreat’ itself is used to denote withdrawal from the world, and a retreat is “a period of days spent apart from the world, in pursuit of religious ends.” 8 A meditation retreat is an opportunity to spend time apart from everyday life during which outside distractions are minimised in order to intensify one’s meditation practice. 9 As this paper illustrates, the primary function of the intensive meditation retreat is to separate the meditator from everyday awareness and facilitate entry into a liminal state. In order to engage in a preliminary analysis of the phenomenon from this perspective, this article limits its subject matter to the intensive vipassana retreat. The primary source material is ethnographic data gathered during fieldwork conducted at the Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre (BMIMC), on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, between 2003 and 2005, and my personal retreat notes from a subsequent retreat I undertook in 2008. Vipassana meditation is derived from the Theravada Buddhism of South and Southeast Asia, where it has a central soteriological role. Vipassana, a Pali term, is translated into English as ‘insight.’10 The aim of the vipassana technique of Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma, the style of vipassana meditation taught at BMIMC, is the attainment of nibbana (Pali for nirvana) through the cultivation of sati, mindfulness, which Mahasi Sayadaw defines as “concentrated attention,” and Nyanaponika Thera as “bare attention,” “the single minded awareness of what happens at the successive moments of perception as presented either through the five physical senses or through the 11 mind.” Gil Fronsdal refers to the Insight Meditation Movement as a loose- 7 Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 253-254. 8 John Bowker (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 813. 9 See Sally McAra, Land of Beautiful Vision: Making a Buddhist Sacred Place in New Zealand (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), p. 54. 10 Gil Fronsdal, ‘Insight Meditation in the United States: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,’ in The Faces of Buddhism in America, eds Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 172-173. 11 Mahasi Sayadaw, Practical Insight Meditation: Basic and Progressive Stages, trans. U Pe Thin and Myanaung U Tin (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1971), p. 20; Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation: A Handbook of Mental Training Literature & Aesthetics 22 (1) June 2012, page 39 The Vipassana Retreat Experience knit lay Buddhist movement taking shape around the practices of vipassana in the West, rather than as a transplant of an Asian Buddhist tradition. The Movement originated in the Theravada Buddhism of Thailand, Burma, and modern India in the 1960s, when Westerners travelling in Asia encountered and began learning vipassana meditation. 12 The Movement has grown in popularity since the 1980s, stimulated by the formation and growth of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts,13 the Spirit Rock Meditation Centre in Marin County, California, 14 and the formation of meditation centres and sitting groups led by teachers or practitioners affiliated with these two, including the popularity of books and tapes produced by these teachers.15 Fronsdal sees this movement as part of a larger movement in the West, inclusive of Theravada monks and nuns who teach vipassana within its Theravadin context, Western teachers who isolate it from its traditional framework to varying degrees, and the non-Buddhists teaching mindfulness practices for secular applications such as pain and stress reduction. 16 Australia has seen similar developments of networks and growth in the number of retreat centres. Insight Meditation Australia is a website for information about Insight meditation teachers and Insight/Mindfulness-retreats in Australia.17 Two well-known vipassana centres, in the Blue Mountains on the outskirts of Sydney, are the Dhamma Bhumi Vipassana Meditation Centre at Blackheath, affiliated with S. N. Goenka,18 and BMIMC. The formation of the Buddha Sasana Association, which owns and manages BMIMC, has close historical connections with the Insight Meditation Movement in the U.S. The popularity of annual retreats held just outside of Sydney, led by American teachers associated with IMS and Spirit Rock such as Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzburg, were the impetus for the purchase of land and the building of BMIMC, known formerly as Sasana House. This historical connection is indicative of the two main considerations in the exploration of any form of Based on the Buddha’s Way of Mindfulness (San Francisco and Newburyport: Weiser Books, 1965), pp. 8, 30-36. 12 Gil Fronsdal, ‘Virtues Without Rules: Ethics in the Insight Meditation Movement,’ in Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, eds Charles S. Prebish and Martin Baumann (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 285-287. 13 See Insight Meditation Society (2012), at http://www.dharma.org. Accessed 13/03/2012. 14 See Spirit Rock Meditation Centre. 15 Fronsdal, ‘Insight Meditation in the United States,’ pp. 164-165; Fronsdal, ‘Virtues Without Rules,’ p. 286. 16 Fronsdal, ‘Virtues Without Rules,’ p. 287. 17 See Insight Meditation Australia. 18 See Vipassana Meditation Centre, Dhamma Bhumi, Blackheath NSW Australia (2012), at http://www.bhumi.dhamma.org/. Accessed 13/03/2012. Literature & Aesthetics 22 (1) June 2012, page 40 Glenys Eddy religious travel. The first is the physical place or places involved and the activities that take place there, in this case the retreat centre and the retreats it hosts. The second is the nature of the traveller or explorer, in this case, the retreatant. I begin with the first, with an examination of the intensive vipassana retreat in the context of the types of Buddhist meditation retreat on offer. The Types of Buddhist Meditation Retreat Available From a survey of information about Buddhist organisations and retreat centres available on the internet, it can be seen that some organisations run more than one type of retreat, which may include workshops, and, further, that retreats appear to fall into two main categories according to the number of meaning- systems drawn upon by the retreat’s content. Some retreats are mixed from this perspective,
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